Author : Miguel Eduardo Rocha Gaso
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781303810305
Total Pages : 181 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (13 download)
Book Synopsis Constraints on Dark Matter and Milky Way Satellite Galaxies from Cosmological Simulations by : Miguel Eduardo Rocha Gaso
Download or read book Constraints on Dark Matter and Milky Way Satellite Galaxies from Cosmological Simulations written by Miguel Eduardo Rocha Gaso and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 181 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cosmological simulations describing the non-linear evolution of dark matter structures in the Universe have become an indispensable tool to study the predictions made by our standard model of cosmology, and to confront them with observations. In this thesis I present a new idea for using cosmological simulations to infer the accretion times of Milky Way satellite galaxies from their observed positions and kinematics. We find that Carina, Ursa Minor, and Sculptor were all accreted early, more than 8 Gyr ago. Five other dwarfs, including Sextans and Segue 1, are also probable early accreters, though with larger uncertainties. On the other extreme, Leo T is just falling into the Milky Way for the first time while Leo I fell ~2 Gyr ago and is now climbing out of the Milky Way's potential after its first perigalacticon. The energies of several other dwarfs, including Fornax and Hercules, point to intermediate infall times, 2 - 8 Gyr ago. Our analysis suggests that the Large Magellanic Cloud crossed inside the Milky Way virial radius recently, within the last ~4 billion years. Also I present new constrains on how strongly dark matter particles can interact with themselves. For this we use a set cosmological simulations that implement a new self-consistent algorithm to treat dark matter self-interactions. We find that self-interacting dark matter models with cross sections in the order [sigma]/m ~ 0.5 cm2 /g ~ 1 barn/GeV would be capable of reproducing the observed core sizes and central densities of dark matter halos in a wide range of scales, from tiny dwarf galaxies to large galaxy clusters, without violating any other observational constraints. Higher resolution simulations over a wider range of masses and properly accounting for the effects of baryonic processes that are not yet included in our simulation will be required to confirm our expectations and place better constraints. I discuss our plans for achieving this goal and show some preliminary results from a new set of simulations.